One-Way-Mirror Society: What has been done by industry regarding privacy?

The industry view of privacy has been officially articulated in a Recommended Code of Conduct for Consumer Tracking Methods that has been provided to the World Privacy Forum. The code of conduct is contained in full in Appendix A.

The code was created by members of POPAI, and took several years and went through several iterations. An early draft of the code of conduct contained a discussion of “passive consent” and active consent by consumers, among other issues. The final version outlines the technologies in use today, and lists those technologies in a general hierarchy of risk. For example, tracking a consumer’s path through a store is seen as a low privacy risk, but “Any method used to personally or uniquely identify consumers, when combined with loyalty program data, or 3rd party marketing data” is categorized as a high privacy risk.

The document represents an important first step in acknowledging the privacy issues inherent in the digital signage industry, however, the document does not begin to approach a point of reasonable tension between consumer interests and industry interests.

Roadmap: The One-Way-Mirror Society – Privacy Implications of the new Digital Signage Networks: VII. What has been done by industry regarding privacy?

This new WPF report finds that medical identity theft is still a crime that causes great harms to its victims, and that it is growing overall in the United States; however, there’s a catch. The national consumer complaint data suggests that the crime is growing at different rates in different states and regions of the US, creating medical identity theft “hotspots.” These hotspots are important for patients, policymakers, and healthcare stakeholders to know about so as to address potential risks.

WPF has conducted original research on India's Aadhaar, a national biometric ID system, including field research in India during 2010-2014. WPF has published the original research in a peer-reviewed journal, Nature-Springer, and in Harvard-based Journal of Technology Science. The research found that systemic challenges to data protection and privacy exist in the Aadhaar system, challenges which do have potential remedies. Key lessons can be learned for both the US and the EU as biometric systems grow in popularity.